The rock sculpture of Decebalus Statue on the Danube river, near the Iron Gates and the city of Orșova, in Mehedinți County, Romania.
Simon Wilson boards a Viking river cruise exploring Eastern Europe and finds it etched with more history than we, perhaps, give the region credit for
In Hungary, they tell you they’ve spent 1000 years surviving every invader, from Genghis Khan to the Soviet Union. In Croatia, they show you how, with trucks turned into tanks, they fought off the brutal Serbian invasion until they couldn’t any longer, in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
In Bulgaria, they honour 500 years of resistance to Ottoman rule. And long before that, to the Romans. In Romania, they mock the tyrant Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, executed by firing squad on Christmas Day just 35 years ago.
You hear all this and you think, we have our own rich history. But it is a very short rich history. In Eastern Europe, cruising the Danube south from Budapest and then east, each day is a new chapter in a very long rich history, complete with towering Roman fortresses, dusky town squares and the cave churches and cathedrals of the Orthodox faith, where the artistic and religious treasures of centuries are displayed and have so often been hidden for safekeeping. It is, by turns, sobering and sublime.
One evening you glide silently up to the Iron Gates, sheer cliffs all around. Just over there is the astonishing 55m-tall head of the Dacian King Decebalus, carved from the hillside. He withstood the Romans 2000 years ago, although the statue is only 20 years old.
There are hydro dams with giant locks that take you down and down, and as you stand with your umbrella in the rain, you can’t stop thinking: Jason and the Argonauts came here.
I love a good river cruise. It’s not just that you visit a different place every day but return to the same hotel room every night – although the benefits of that do begin to seem magical. No daily packing, no twiddling your thumbs in transit, and every day the delights of starting afresh.
In general, mornings involve a half-day tour for everyone who wants to go, usually by bus with some time for walking around and a guided visit to a major public attraction. Then in the afternoon and the evening, there are smaller, optional tours and visits: galleries, a biking or hiking trip, boutique concerts, home visits, archaeological expeditions, cooking classes, night-life excursions, botanical tours.
When there are just a couple of hundred passengers on your boat, the crew give you a boutique experience. Everyone gets to know the tour manager, or at least has a pretty good sense that they do. On the optional trips your group might be small enough to fit in a single minibus.
The suites are comfortable and roomy, with the external wall all windows, and the travel itself is peaceful. If you’ve booked a verandah room, you can sit outside, in private, right by the water as you slide into the evening.
Or you can sit up on the roof, which is kitted out as a long terrace, with deckchairs, tables and sunshades, a walking track and outdoor games.
Most of the passengers were American. It’s fascinating, being among Americans right now. A few were pro-Trump, but reluctant to talk about it. Most were against. Possibly, one told me, because Viking the tour company, had done a lot of advertising on the relatively liberal PBS radio and TV.
One 89-year-old man from North Carolina talked to me one night about his fears for his country, and I realised he was crying.
You can make good friendships on a river cruise. And another thing: your ship will fit right in. It won’t tower over every town it visits, it won’t discharge thousands of passengers into choked city streets, it won’t burn large quantities of heavy fuel oil. The Viking ships are electric.
You dock quietly and gently, and you get to visit small and very wonderful places that couldn’t cope if there were 10 times as many of you.
And you’re on a great, wide, endlessly drifting river!
Jason and the Argonauts is a tale from before the fall of Troy. History flows through everything, not with a castle around every corner, as in Western Europe, but in town after town where they’ve suffered conquest after conquest and learned to survive.
And in the ruins and the regeneration, in the gilded icons and other treasures they kept safe, in the mountains and forests and on that wide river, it’s often very beautiful.
Budapest and Bucharest are the bookends to this trip. Hungary to Romania, with Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria in between.
The Hungarian capital is a large city split in two by the river. The western Buda side features a long hill arrayed with castles, towers, churches and battlements. Pest, flat and to the east, is the commercial centre and also home to the enormous Parliament building.
Officially it’s a monument to the people, but really it was built by a small but very determined bourgeoisie with a point to prove. They wanted the old aristocracy to know they were the new life force of the country.
So they built a neo-gothic Parliament as impressive as Westminster, “inaugurating” it in 1896, the year Hungarians say marks the country’s 1000th anniversary. Across town in Heroes’ Square, the founding moment in 896 is commemorated with seven bronze statues of Magyar chieftains on horseback. They’re arranged around a tall column, topped by the archangel Gabriel, wings up, holy crown and double-barred cross of St Stephen, the first king, held high.
Hungarians seem extremely fond of their mythic heroes: the city is full of statues of them.
There’s much else to see and do, although our highlight wasn’t organised at all. We were browsing the shops when the sky filled suddenly with seething clouds and lightning flashes and the rain came thundering down. We ran for the nearest restaurant and ate the rest of the afternoon away with bowls of a glorious goulash and a bottle of local wine that wasn’t bulls’ blood.
Southwards beyond Pest, the Great Hungarian Plain rolls on forever. It’s flat, fertile and indefensible, and served as a highway into Europe for every invading army.
The theme repeats, over and over: resistance, conquest and occupation. On an excursion in Croatia, we visit Mandar, an elderly woman whose village was evacuated when the Serbs arrived in 1991. We eat her cakes and drink her plum brandy and she tells us the Serbs who occupied the village took everything valuable when they left – the doors, the window frames, the wiring ripped from the wall.
Some of them had been Serbian Croats already living there – her neighbours, her friends – before war broke out.
Later, in Serbia, we wander through the mighty fortress of Golubac, built in the 14th century on the site of old Roman and Byzantine settlements. They strung an iron chain from the fortress right across the river, to facilitate the collection of a kind of goods and services tax.
But Golubac wasn’t mighty enough and for 500 years Serbia lost control of it, first to the Turks and then to Bulgarians, Hungarians and finally Austrians.
Restoration of the 10 tall towers is well underway and there’s a fabulous collection of weaponry, jewellery and more on display, along with some captivating video histories. They even have concerts there.
In Bulgaria, we take a bus trip to Belogradchik, where the Romans built their barracks around the site of massive vertical rock formations. Our guide Benni reels off some of the shapes locals can see in these fingers pointing at the sky: a monk, a horseman, the Madonna, a schoolgirl, a bear, Adam and Eve, a wedding procession, a cuckoo, a camel, there are so many.
On the way, we pass abandoned factories, always with graffiti and broken glass, sometimes burnt out, the weeds growing high but the buildings not pulled down. The owners are absent, or they’re not owned at all, and the authorities do not have the money for repairs or even demolition. Or perhaps they have been kept as monuments to folly.
Benni is grumpy about this. She tells us everyone in Bulgaria is grumpy. The leaders who did so much damage under communism have never been held properly to account; many of them have prospered again. She says what most of our guides say: You are very welcome in our country and we want you to know the truth.
Sometimes the history reaches even further back. Lepenski Vir is a Serbian archaeological site overlooking the river, near the Iron Gates. When the hydro scheme was announced, archaeologists protested: the site was already known to be valuable. They were given the two years of the first dam’s construction period to find and save what they could.
You can buy little replicas of the result: hundreds of ceramic heads, human but with fish mouths. They also found the intact floor pans of huts, all identically formed, with the floors themselves made from smooth ferrous rock set around a fire pit. The rock would have transmitted warmth from the fires, giving these huts underfloor heating.
They were at least 1500 years old. The archaeologists dug deeper, and found another layer, with the remains of more huts, with the same floor pans. And deeper again, and again. By the time they had to stop, they’d gone back almost 10,000 years, and in every age the people lived in huts with identical floors.
The whole site was then carefully dug up and removed, and you can see it all laid out in layers now, safely preserved inside a glassed-in enclosure.
In Bucharest, they have a Parliament even larger than Budapest’s, although it’s more recent and no monument to democracy. The Ceaușescus built it in the style of neo-classical socialist realism, better known as brutalist Stalinism, and it has the dubious distinction of being the heaviest administrative building in the world.
The Ceaușescus’ own residence is also a palace, although more domestically scaled. The building and its rooms are elegantly proportioned but opulently filled, with marble, parquet, tapestries, gold fittings and gold paint everywhere you look. There’s even an indoor swimming pool with frescoes on every surface. It’s as if the Roman Empire had been restored to life, and then, Vesuvius-like, snuffed out again.
History and an emerging modern life: they jostle for attention all along the eastern stretches of the Danube, while the river runs impassively through it all. The people welcome you, tell you their stories, show you their treasures, and you come away feeling deeply rewarded.
In Belgrade, the Serbian capital, the main street has been fully pedestrianised, like the main streets of almost every city and town we visited, and in the late morning, the old buildings and the street itself were alive with shoppers.
At the bottom of that street, we came across what might just be my favourite homage to the great depths of time. There’s a Roman castle, some of its stone walls crumbling venerably, others lovingly restored. And beneath those walls, in an area that was once a moat, there’s a children’s park filled with dinosaurs. How’s that for history.
Getting there
Qatar Airways flies from Auckland to Budapest with a stopover in Doha.
Details
Viking offers river cruises on all the main waterways of Europe, including several on the Danube. The full river trip runs from Amsterdam in the west to the Black Sea in the east, but for those seeking a shorter trip, there are stages that begin or end in Paris, Budapest and various German cities.
Three ocean swims over three days? How hard could it be?